The irritation
Inspired by Michael Reeves' Trigger Me Elmo, I wanted to turn an ordinary eyeball wall clock into something that noticed when you stared and punished you for it.
HardwareRetiredBuilt and retired
Mean Clock
A retired Raspberry Pi eyeball clock that watched for eye contact, then screamed a crowdsourced insult through its speakers.
- Current state
- Retired — Built and retired
- Jack’s role
- Concept, Hardware prototyping, Computer vision, Development
- Find it in the workshop
- Arrival Workshop · Unfriendly wall clock
Built because…
The real build story.
What I built
I put a Raspberry Pi, camera, and speakers behind the clock, used face-and-eye positions to estimate a stare, and built a website where people submitted insults that were converted to speech and downloaded by the clock.
The hard part
A neural gaze model would not run well on the Raspberry Pi 4, so I fell back to simpler geometry that was only about sixty percent accurate. False triggers are especially noticeable when the output is a shouted obscenity.
Under the casing
Proof, not decoration.
Build evidence02 items
- A Raspberry Pi, camera, speakers, and physical eyeball clock working together
- Crowdsourced text-to-speech insults delivered from cloud storage
- Raspberry Pi
- Pi Camera
- Python
- Computer vision
- Text-to-speech
- Google Cloud Storage
Scope of work
What I owned.
- Concept
- Hardware prototyping
- Computer vision
- Development
No victory-lap math
Outcome and lesson.
Where it landed
The physical clock worked, but it triggered unreliably, my fiancée hated living with it, and I eventually shelved the project and reused the Raspberry Pi.
What stayed
A funny hardware demo still has to survive the room it lives in. For an always-on object, reliability and household tolerance are real product requirements.
Field notes
This project has a physical address.
In the playable workshop, Mean Clock lives in the Arrival Workshop as a unfriendly wall clock. You can inspect it without unlocking anything.